On Saturday, April 13 2024, a white male entered a large shopping complex in the inner Sydney suburb of Bondi Junction and murdered, as of writing, five innocent women and a male security guard using a long-blade knife before being cornered and killed by police. He hospitalised numerous others with stab wounds including the nine-month-old baby of one of the deceased.

Given the unique nature of the crime: the use of a knife, within a typically peaceful shopping environment, its obsession with women, amid months of incitement to violence by a professional pro-Hamas crowd on Australia’s streets it was easy to apply logic to the belief that this was an act of Islamist extremism.

This perception was only aided by a heinous by-product, when some on social feeds maliciously reported that the perpetrator had a Jewish name—and the mainstream media house Seven Network subsequently parroted it. Police were quick to quash that rumour.

I was convinced that this crime was indeed the act of a suicide terrorist. I knew that it didn’t show the hallmarks of al Qaeda—multiple crime sites with simultaneous execution—but it did reek of ISIS—multiple victims by a crude close combat attack and a willingness of the perpetrator to die.

Yet, Queensland Police immediately aided New South Wales law enforcement when it was learned that the murderer had travelled interstate leaving his parents up north. They also quickly confirmed no criminal record, no radical affiliations, nor any Muslim background.

They did, however, report that he “was known to police” with a history of mental illness requiring psychiatric care.

Speculation continues whether this crime can be labelled “terrorism”. Even though evidence suggests otherwise, I’m still certain that today’s pro-Hamas environment did have a role in its play—and given that Hamas remains a proscribed terror organisation, it raises the question:

Should pro-Hamas marches be allowed to continue?

Here’s my argument supporting the terror link theory as I penned it on X in a thread that disagreed with me.

Hate on the street in the mind

There is still too much nuance to explore in this mass murder to deny any link to “Islamist” terror. Let me explain:

1) We have now uncovered that the murderer had been under psychiatric care for at least one mental disorder.

2) We know that he was not a Muslim.

3) Queensland Police tell us that he had no criminal history but he was still known to them.

4) We know that his murder weapon was a long-blade knife rather than a concealed switchblade.

5) We know that he had a fixation during his murder spree on female targets of opportunity (yes, with 1 male security guard also killed).

6) We know that his chosen crime scene was Bondi Junction, a central locale in Sydney’s Jewish community, and that he chose a Westfield Shopping Centre founded by a Holocaust survivor.

That said:

7) We also know that his crime occurred at a time of UNPRECDENTED violent antisemitic hate and boycott speech by a pro-Hamas terror mob in Australia’s streets, overseas, and online.

8) We know that Hamas’s fanatics and Iran’s other Islamist proxies are vehemently misogynist.

9) We know that Hamas’s supporters of late in Israel and Europe no longer use suicide vests to inflict terror but opt to kill their targets with knives.

10) We know that social media, particularly TikTok, hosts videos of these knife killings including pro-Palestinian media instructing how to kill humans with a knife.

So, it’s now for coroners and police to piece together any influence these motivators may have had on the Bondi Junction killer.

I believe that, given the killer’s modus operandi and cowardly choice of targets, that an INDIRECT link will be found between this mass murder and Islamist extremism.

Given today’s unique ramp up in extremism multiplied by an unprecedented, unmoderated, citizen media its hatred is powerful enough to convince the right person at the right time with a severe personality disorder, to fantasise that he is being called on a mission to kill. He will not be the last—this is what violent extremism intends and how it works.

Which is why Australia must not only beef up its laws against hate speech and incitement again—but must also begin to enforce them now so that freedom of speech is returned to the civil discourse it always intended.

In my opinion, weighing the tragic coincidences of the above:

The Free Palestine mob, led by its Islamist cadre, is responsible for inciting a mentally disturbed man to commit a heinous crime of femicide in Bondi Junction.

Let me be proved wrong.

Picture credit: amante2 via X, 2024, public domain.

Categories: Social Media, World Affairs

Tagged: Bondi Junction, Hamas, Islamism, Murder, Terrorism, TikTok

The Attempted Takeover of Mainstream Media After Ten Years of War in Gaza

Adam Parker

Posted on April 8, 2024

Ten years ago, there were no Israeli troops in Gaza until three Israeli teens went missing in the West Bank.

Found dead in Hebron, a wave of riots and mass arrests of Hamas operatives inspired the proscribed terror organisation to unleash a rocket fusillade across its Gazan border. In return, Israel launched airstrikes followed by a land campaign. After seven weeks degrading Hamas’s firing sites and tunnel networks a truce came. Over 4,000 rockets had been fired at Israel, and of both militants and civilians combined, an estimated 2,000 Gazans and 70 Israelis were dead.

Nine years later, on October 7 2023 Hamas invaded Israel across the its southern Gazan border. In an orgy of violence including gang rape, torture, corpse theft and abuse, hostage taking, and infant kidnapping it killed 1,200 civilians and Israeli soldiers.

Today, while Israel’s fight to eliminate Hamas and recover its hostages is about to reach its crescendo in Rafah, an estimated 130 hostages remain in Palestinian hands and thousands of Hamas operatives and Gazan civilians lay dead.

Hamas called its own invasion “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”. Israel replied with “Operation Swords of Iron”. In the greatest miscalculation since Palestine refused statehood in 1947, the only thing flooding anything at present is Gaza’s rubble and the blood of Hamas, its diehard supporters and its innocent human shields.

In 2014 the Australian print masthead Sydney Morning Herald, then owned by the iconic Fairfax Media, ran an article critical of Israel’s offensive in Gaza featuring an antisemitic cartoon.

Complaints followed and then exploded when the piece’s journalist took to social media abusing his critics. His subsequent resignation prompted my essay below.

What no one could have foreseen as I reprise it today, however, was the seismic shift in the demographics of Australia, the EU, UK, US and Canada brought on by ten years of illegal Muslim immigration following the rise of ISIS in the aftermath of the 2014 Syrian Civil War.

Nor could anyone have forecast its social media impact on Gen Z and late-Gen Y making them perfect anarchic cannon fodder.

This uncontrolled, violent, Islamist-driven support for Hamas’s October atrocities across the West, has prompted some trusted media entities notably the BBC, Reuters, and Associated Press to parrot Hamas propaganda and fuel antisemitic rhetoric. They’ve done so unashamedly and recanted if ever with reluctance.

Yet, not all media houses have joined their ride. Unlike the BBC, Australia’s public broadcaster ABC and Fairfax, now owned by Nine Entertainment, have ordered staff to practice reporting neutrality.

Some journalists have resigned, some have been sacked, some are seeking legal redress, some are seeking social media fame.

This is where the lessons of Fairfax Media in 2014 come into relevance because history always checks the elasticity of change.

The Online PR Failure of Fairfax Media

First published August 10 2014.

The conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas these past weeks has lifted the lid on animosities and biases long thought dead in the West following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.

A ramp up of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, anti-Islamism—the emergence of new categories: Judeophobia, Islamophobia—and the weirdest of all—Likudism (referring to the right-wing political party currently holding the balance of power in the Israeli parliament and a none too hidden wordplay on “Nazism”) have stormed our TVs, our reading material, and our streets.

A few days ago, they hit a business empire too, in Australia of all places, as a once vaunted PR machine failed when it came to managing its online interactions.

Dateline—Saturday July 26 2014

Plastic-wrapped rolls of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper thumped on pavements across Australia’s most liberal city. Online, its sibling Age newspaper lit up computer screens in Melbourne to the south.

These were the flagship journals of the Fairfax Media Empire, and in them sat a column with a foreboding headline:

Israel’s rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism.

It was an opinion piece, crafted by Australian journalist Mike Carlton and if not for a cartoon that accompanied it, readers might have lounged unaware.

That cartoon’s message was blatant though. The work of Australian-based illustrator of New Yorker magazine fame Glen Le Lievre, it conjured up days of a 1930s Third Reich propaganda rag Der Sturmer. The caricature with its stereotypically Jewish nose started passions rolling.

And a PR nightmare was just beginning to hit the fan.

Carlton’s article led off with a descriptive scene from the streets: “The images from Gaza are searing, a gallery of death and horror”. It continued with an account of the reported injury toll; it spoke of destruction, occupation, and of a former Australian Prime Minister [Malcolm Fraser] who’d labelled Israel’s combat stance a “war crime” (this same PM had recently called for an end to the US-Australian alliance).

It admitted: “Yes, Hamas is also trying to kill Israeli civilians, with a barrage of rockets and guerrilla border attacks. It, too, is guilty of terror and grave war crimes”.

Personally, I saw nothing scandalous in the piece. [Notably 10 years later his accusation of Israeli “genocide” then makes the same sloganeering today so passé.] Indeed, it was impassioned. But as a writer of opinion too, I’m a fervent believer in free speech—to the extent that it never amounts to vilification or defamation. For so long as a person who vehemently disagrees with me is allowed to say such, I possess the right of reply.

There certainly were things technically wrong with the article. Its geo-political analysis was lightweight, its military insight missing, and its knowledge of law pertaining to international conflict confused.

All these deficiencies were very surprising, considering that 68-year-old Carlton, a long-standing journalist, had earned his stripes in the war-ravaged jungles of Vietnam. But then there was that cartoon.

And something else happened.

From the get-go, readers bombarded Carlton in protest using Fairfax-supplied email addresses and Twitter feeds. They inundated the editors of the Sydney Morning Herald with caricature-driven ire.

Eventually, Carlton erupted.

Through Tweets and email replies he began telling critics to “fuck off.” He used the phrase, “Jewish bigot” once.

What Carlton forgot in all this, was that these critics were the customers of Fairfax’s newspapers.

They weren’t his to respond to at all.

Dateline – Monday August 4, 2014

With complaints unabated, including allegations by Australian attorney general George Brandis of antisemitic vilification and disgust voiced by federal communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, the Sydney Morning Herald launched a full editorial apology:

“There has been widespread reader and community reaction during the past 10 days over a cartoon that was used to illustrate an opinion piece by columnist Mike Carlton on the conflict in Gaza … The cartoon showed an elderly man, with a large nose, sitting alone, with a remote control device in his hand, overseeing explosions in Gaza. The armchair in which he was sitting was emblazoned with the Star of David, and the man was wearing a kippah, a religious skullcap. A strong view was expressed that the cartoon, by Glen Le Lievre, closely resembled illustrations that had circulated in Nazi Germany. These are menacing cartoons that continue to haunt and traumatise generations of Jewish people … The Herald now appreciates that, in using the Star of David and the kippah in the cartoon, the newspaper invoked an inappropriate element of religion, rather than nationhood, and made a serious error of judgment. It was wrong to publish the cartoon in its original form”.

Two days later, Mike Carlton resigned. In an interview with Australia’s Nine News Network, he said, “And then I got a call later at night from someone higher up the Fairfax food chain just stating quite blandly ‘we are going to suspend you for four to six weeks to consider’ … at that point I interrupted and said ‘don’t go to any trouble, I’ve resigned’ and hung up”.

Fairfax’s director of news and business media Sean Aylmer was more forthcoming. He prefaced a second apology by the paper:

The column attracted a lot of criticism. Many readers wrote to Mike—what got him into trouble was the way he responded to those readers.

Indeed, as Fairfax’s largest competitor News Corp reported in its Australian newspaper: “Several employees expressed concern to Aylmer that this was not appropriate behaviour for a senior columnist. It would not be acceptable for any other Fairfax journalist and Carlton’s behaviour was damaging The Sydney Morning Herald’s brand”.

And there lies the rub.

The PR dangers of online customer interaction

The PR nightmare that Fairfax finds itself in at present is not one purely of an editorial making —though the company rightly admits some terrible lapses in editorial judgment.

Its basis rests in giving employees and contractors unrestricted access to its online customers. Doing so can effectively kill a brand.

I’ve never understood why publishers provide authors, writers, and journalists with public email and Twitter accounts, and then encourage them “to go and mix it up”.

Brands are delicate entities: they require nurturing, polishing, defending, and closely managed airing. Why would any business deregulate the way its lifeblood is promoted?

Giving a columnist free reign with irate readers, is akin to putting your customer service in the hands of overseas telemarketing centres whose operators can barely string a coherent fact-finding session together.

Yet, every day, businesses are doing just that.

And the printing presses at Fairfax are now spluttering with both Jewish and Muslim community groups threatening a boycott.

How this all could have been avoided

There are some Golden Rules when it comes to marketing. Unhappy customers will privately tell 8-20 others of their complaint. Unhappy customers will publicly tell an unlimited number of others via social media. And for every unhappy customer that lets a business know, 26 others will not.

How many of Fairfax’s readers might jump ship given a few hundred complaints caused by Mike Carlton’s actions? This multiplier effect sets the online parameters for what’s at stake.

We’ve all seen policies lumped on employees regarding the use of social media in their private time. Typical of these goes: “Don’t talk on behalf of the company especially to the media without explicit permission. It will be grounds for dismissal”.

But what happens when explicit permission has been granted, as was the case with Mike Carlton? Here the answer is quite simple: don’t release it lightly.

It’s great in general to leverage the power of social media these days and hope for a more interactive client engagement. But that optimum concept remains the realm of theory.

There is a photo of Israelis watching the bombardment of Gaza from a hilltop across the border. It purportedly inspired the cartoon used by the Sydney Morning Herald and was Tweeted by Le Lievre after complaints started flooding in.

Look closely. There’s no remote control in anyone’s hand. No celebration. In fact, without a follow-up interview, nothing about the onlookers’ perceptions can be gauged.

So, you add a crooked nose, a Star of David on the seat-back and anyone could have guessed that a multifaceted PR nightmare was in the making.

All it required was an unregulated voice to topple the Jenga. And former Fairfax journalist Mike Carlton (whose son-in-law is Jewish) supplied it. The real question, therefore, is straightforward in scope.

Why was he ever left alone to use it?

Categories: Social Media, World Affairs

Tagged: Fairfax, Gaza, Hamas, Immigration, Israel, Journalism, Mike Carlton, Propaganda, Sydney Morning Herald

RIP San Francisco: Memories of Dining With Marilyn Monroe

Adam Parker

Posted on March 1, 2024

With the permanent closure of San Francisco’s Macy’s at Union Square announced two days ago, the city that I used to call my gateway into the US via Australia has died. Ten years ago, I wrote this homage to a place that, both breakfast and dinner, became a favourite haunt—part piano bar, home food comfort, part a place to watch some big screen ESPN or order a classic Martini. Rest in peace San Francisco, victim of endless homelessness and this past decade uncontrolled illegal immigration. The homeless were always with you but their code to passers-by was live and let live. Now in 2024, it’s obviously become too hard for business owners, locals, tourists and the homeless alike to co-exist. A great city has been lost, ironically not too far from where Silicone Valley multibillionaires roamed.

First published March 23 2014

It’s hard to believe that the woman celebrated as the Candle in the Wind, once had ties to the greatest of American pastimes; even harder to believe that she did so in a city that boasted a Candlestick Park in her days.

Yet, Marilyn Monroe’s legacy lives on in an expected way. Try a restaurant where sport is the theme and the Irish coffee strong, as locals and visitors alike rub shoulders under her gaze together with those of some of baseball’s early legends.

Situated in the heart of San Francisco near the corner of Union Square, at Geary and Powell, Lefty O’Doul’s Tavern beckons the onlooker with an old town presence that spans the clock.

Dinner service boasts a triple play buffet that you know must be good, when outside you’ll find squad cars of the SFPD, their exhausted officers busily squaring away roast beef and potatoes in a welcome respite from Twinkies and cold brew.

San Francisco, as its reputation goes, is known for its over-presence of the homeless and the eccentric.

One night, looking for a place to dine, a deep, gravelled voice rattled at my back: “You don’t want to eat there. Go to Lefty’s.”

I turned my head, and it might have been the great Satchmo—Louis Armstrong—himself. But there stood a short, elderly man—his overcoat having seen better days, with sagacity in his eyes.

“What?” I replied.

“Go to Lefty’s,” he said with a slight nod, then looked me up and down (probably knowing I could never accompany him on the piano—or more likely thinking I could eat a small cow) and shuffled off into the lights.

Four visits to the City by the Bay later and I still eat at Lefty’s, breakfast usually, and make sure of a regular late night tipple.

I don’t know who this guy was; of gastronomic erudition I harness no doubt.

But in a place known for its restaurant rows, there’s nothing like a story from an eating-house that honours baseball in the presence of the bubbling: such was the hallmark of Marilyn Monroe.

Postscript

For a special night’s gastronomic experience, I recommend hopping across the road to the Bourbon Grill inside the Westin St Francis. Try any one of their $$$ signature steaks and a brilliant glass of $$ local red. You’ll have just enough remaining for a couple of happy $ Irishes at Lefty’s later.

Main picture: Lefty’s early morning, author’s photograph.

Categories: Business, Life

Tagged: Dining, Macy's, San Francisco, Union Square

For Covidiot Conspiracists Antisemitism is the New Fad

Adam Parker

Posted on February 12, 2024

It used to be that I reserved Twitter (back then) for the Red Sox, critiquing Carols by Candlelight, and the Super Bowl. Such simple days. Alas fighting Covidiots and now, seeing them morph into religious bigots has forced that X platform open for me.

Palestine has been a tragedy ever since I was a kid but as an adult who studies history I know where bigotry has also led globally.

I remember being an infant around the time of the Biafran famine, the famines in Ethiopia and Somalia all born by hate and climate. Religion brought the 1960s and 70s of the PLO in its Munich Olympics massacre and hijackings culminating in Entebbe, Egypt’s numerous Suez crises, the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, and then the Lebanese Civil War with its radicalisation and massacres at Shatila and Sabra all born of hate, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I saw religious intolerance by atheists, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims (and their sects within) in the carnage of Ireland, Kampuchea, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua. There is absolutely no way that anyone can underplay the still active volcano that’s the Kashmir Valley. And it’s criminal for anyone to turn a blind eye today to South Sudan that should be the world’s prime focus for peacemaking—eight million refugees—but that’s just a Black versus Black war of Muslims fighting Muslims; as was the gassing of Syria and the nightmare of Libya. There is religion underlying Putin’s Russian crusade in Ukraine.

So, I’m not going to sit back and let the empowerment of Covidiot-grifters morph into the empowerment of antisemitic grifting while the Atheist Left eventually realises that the Far Right wants a repeat of 1933 in the Left’s eradication too.

The Far Left are just sorry souls lost in the narcissism of their smart phone social apps.

I caught a glimpse of an article in the UK’s Telegraph today that blamed the turmoil in the Middle East since 1948 on Israel’s existence.

And there it is.

That’s the same argument that blames rape on the existence of women.

That’s a vile world view I will never support. We can’t stop a person’s hate, but we can stop it infecting our societal values of freedom to worship, freedom of opportunity, and freedom from fear.

Right now, the world needs to act in Gaza. It needs to open Egypt’s Sinai border, assist Egypt curtail the threat of insurgent Islamic terror resulting, document all Gazan refugees and ensure that they—and only they have a right to return to a free Palestine, with a non-Hamas, non-extremist government that matches a similar new government in Israel. Both built for peace.

Today is Super Bowl.

Picture credit: “Wilson Official NFL football”. Courtesy Wilson Football, Creative Commons, CC0 Public Domain.

Categories: Life, World Affairs

Tagged: Antisemitism, Covid-19, Gaza, Hamas, Hate, Israel, Misogyny, Palestine, Rafah

How the Palestinians Changed Local Intifada into Global Antisemitism and Why it Will Fail Too

Adam Parker

Posted on February 7, 2024

Here’s a short tale of two documentaries I watched this week, now years old, that together explain why Israel followed the infamous Hamas rampage of October 7 2023 with the abject destruction of the Gaza Strip, and how Hamas wanted it to happen.

Its story dates to a bad mistake made by a people called the “Arabs” in 1947 and what the “Palestinians”—a brand created in 1965 to define a new people concurrent with the birth of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation—decided to do next.

As we’ll see, seventy-six years after 1947, Palestinians still refuse to accept their past and rectify their error declining a state of their own. Instead, they’ve opted to foment antisemitism under the Hamas Palestinian flag. The result is that the Gaza Strip, like Lebanon of 1982, is now utterly devastated. However, this time, it also bodes a worrying fate for the wider world, a bloodied moonscape over the West in its wake.

Today, protected by Western freedoms, Islamist agitators have taken the Palestinian victim tactic, better known as “intifada”, into the streets of Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia where their same miscalculation of past intifadas will ruin them again.

The first documentary forms an Al Jazeera series titled “PLO: History of a Revolution”. Here, in its very introduction, we learn the true nature of the Palestinian “nakba” (Arabic for “tragedy”). Pay close attention to this verbatim excerpt below—brackets added for clarification:

“In 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed, Palestine was lost … The first challenge the Palestinians faced, was to wrest control of their own destiny from the Arab regimes … (By 1965) they believed armed struggle was the only way to wrest control of their stolen homeland. The Arab regimes did not share this view fearing a war with Israel … (In 1947) Britain handed over Palestine (called the ‘Palestine EY Mandate’) to the United Nations … The UN General Assembly decided to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab the other Jewish … This partition plan was rejected by Palestinians and neighbouring Arab States … Following the withdrawal of the last British troops in May 1948 Jewish leaders proclaimed their establishment of the State of Israel … On the very next day five Arab armies from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syrian and Iraq immediately declared war.”

So, says Al Jazeera, the Arabs said “no” to an Arab State; the Arabs then declared war rather than choosing the prosperity of peace.

The second documentary is a Vice News broadcast titled “Digital Intifada”. Here we learn how the Palestinians moved their propaganda online where today it melds with radical Islam in the social ether.

This strategy exploited the content moderation vulnerabilities of Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in the pre-TikTok days. We’re told that its style cloned ISIS. We’re also shown how it went beyond recording killings, to instructing viewers how to kill.

What we get from both productions is an understanding that the pro-Hamas marches we’re seeing in the West since October 7 are not organic. They’re the work of a carefully prepared jihadist fifth column whose mission is to take digital antisemitism live.

While it’s easy to say they’re doing so because of a now well-ingrained jealous hatred of Jews, which is partly correct, anyone who’s read the actual Hamas Convention (its manifesto) knows that it is “martyrdom” fuelling true believers towards their goal—and that goal is the hastening of Allah’s final “judgement” in the world by way of building an Islamic Palestinian Caliphate.

Reality is, Western homeland security apparatuses fell asleep after the Syrian Civil War. They allowed an armada of illegal post-Arab Spring aliens to breach the EU’s borders unchecked and undocumented. Some held instructions to go underground and prepare second- and third-generation radicalised immigrant descendants wherever found to wake.

The only way to protect the freedoms of the West in Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia going forward, is to take down each cadre cell in a manner that new heads can’t grow. Such is Israel’s war aim in Gaza where the Hamas leadership sits in tunnels below Palestinian human shields. It explains the conflict’s civilian casualties.

Gazans, now becoming freed of their Hamas overlords, are calling for a new representative government and hope. In the Palestinian diaspora, building hope will be as important as deporting hard liners.

There’s decades of antisemitic indoctrination among its youth to overcome.

The Global War on Terror did not end, as was believed, with the fall of ISIS. It’s now in every Western neighbourhood, seemingly protected by democracy and underwritten by free speech. Make no mistake, the jihad has come to town.

The irony is, there will still be no Palestine that comes from it. The only road to peace is negotiation for a two-state solution with a free Palestine side-by-side a free Israel.

Just as every Palestinian seeking the overthrow of Hamas and every Israeli seeking the resignation of the Netanyahu Government knows, that requires statecraft, not terrorism.

Links:

Al Jazeera “PLO: History of a Revolution, Episode 1”:

https://youtu.be/aGC_hHii1jo?si=cudQmZ2st7JrY1Hc

Vice News “Digital Intifada”:

https://youtu.be/rsxAoNPJtog?si=OwVrS9njMpoxSQ-r

Categories: Military, World Affairs

Tagged: Antisemitism, Gaza, Hamas, Illegal, Immigration, Intifada, Israel Hamas War, Palestine, Protest

Islamist Extremism Puts Australia’s Anzac Day at Risk

Adam Parker

Posted on January 12, 2024

Every 25th of April since 1927, Australia has taken a public holiday to celebrate its fallen in all wars. Doing so, it has placed a principal focus on its Anzac fighting force of World War 1 when Australia’s military claimed its right of independent command from Britain. Hence the holiday’s name: Anzac Day. Australia’s first commanding general was John Monash. A member of the Jewish faith, his name today graces a highway, an electorate and one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.

Anzac Day is not a sombre moment, though memorial services are held. Past and present military members and their descendants march in processions. The whole traditionally ends in pubs with games of Two-up thrown in honouring the Diggers of old.

That then, is the preamble. What follows now is controversial though not racist. All non-indigenous Australians are “immigrants” of sorts in their family trees. It is a statement of concern.

Australia’s policy of multiculturalism starting in the early 1970s sought to rightly infuse diversity in the nation while underpinning its values of mateship, fair go and ingenuity. It didn’t come easily but as Europeans and Asians integrated while also reflecting themselves culturally, it worked.

In 2024, Australia Day (Australia’s foundation day celebrated January 26th annually) is at risk for its alleged celebration of “colonialism”. Right or wrong, Australia’s Indigenous People have a right to make that claim on their terra firma.

But I assure you that Anzac Day will soon follow suit and it will have nothing to do with Australian rights.

Rather, “Islamists” (i.e. non-secular Muslims) will claim that it celebrates Australia’s fight against the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate in WW1 and its success in bringing it down—which Anzac Day does. Gallipoli was fought in Turkey; the Lighthorsemen fought through present-day Israel—then Ottoman Empire land.

Thing is, modern Islamic Turkey has never had a problem with Anzac Day. Both countries still see post-WW1 as a time to heal. Both nation’s people attend dawn services on Gallipoli’s shores. But as we have witnessed since October 2023, Australia’s streets have changed with pro-terror groupthink and Australia’s criminal code has only this week responded to adapt.

A succession of weak prime ministers since 2001 has diluted Australia’s confidence in its self-image and fabric. This must be repaired. It starts with the public message, public education, public health and public service and it must begin now.

Australia is at a critical junction as Hamas in Gaza faces its pending defeat by Israel while the cruellest Muslim versus Muslim civil war in modern times is displacing five million Sudanese amid mass rape and murder, ignored by the “Free Palestine” mobs who march, graffiti and terrorise—shouting outlawed Nazi slogans and posting outlawed Nazi symbols at a Jewish community.

Australia is at an intersection indeed. One road sign points to “g’day”. The other, says “hate”.

Picture credit: An Aleppo pine tree grows in Caulfield Park, Victoria, Australia. It accompanies a plaque that reads: “From the original lone pine on Gallipoli, grown in the jubilee year 1965, planted in memory of departed comrades, LEST WE FORGET”. Caulfield Park was defaced with antisemitic graffiti this week. Author’s photograph.

Categories: Military, World Affairs

Tagged: Antisemitism, Anzac, Islamist, Multiculturalism, Palestine, Sudan, Terror, Turkey

Cleaning up Hate Australia Bans Nazi and Islamic State Symbols

Adam Parker

Posted on January 9, 2024

Amid the political contradiction that has formed Australia’s muddled response to growing Islamist unrest across the world and the upswing of extreme left and right wing anarchy since the downfall of Donald Trump in 2020, a strong firming of its national anti-terror infrastructure became law yesterday.

The Australian Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Prohibited Hate Symbols and Other Measures) Bill 2023 sought to reinforce a uniquely Australian value called “mateship”—a colloquialism that roughly translates as freedom from fear.

Its assent now changes the discourse on the street. It will curtail the activity of mobs who have pursued grift rallying for the cause of antisemitism, islamophobia and against the multicultural fabric that has shaped this country since the late 1960s. It modifies Australia’s Crimes Act 1914 and Criminal Code Act 1995 with the specific purpose of criminalising the “public display and trading of the prohibited Nazi and Islamic State symbols”.

Note the latter.

This legislation is not merely aimed at the multitude of wannabe gangs who throw Nazi salutes (also illegal across Australia). These amendments move beyond the fringe of Neo-Nazism and into the mainstream psychosis of Islamist Extremism (aka “Islamism”—note the difference to “Islam”, a peaceful religion), that must equally be quashed with every societal effort.

Hence its enabling material read that: “Schedule 1 of the bill makes it a criminal offence to publicly display prohibited symbols—the Nazi hakenkreuz, the Nazi double sig rune, and the Islamic State flag—and trade items bearing these symbols”.

As of yesterday then, the Pro-Hamas mob can no longer rally with, sell or distribute any material that links or suggests a tie to Islamism meaning: Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad or ISIS.

Further, no one can now publicly champion Neo Nazism or Islamism.

In other words, chanting or placarding slogans for “intifada”, a new “Holocaust”, “another October 7” and the phrase “river to the sea” are now suspect. Equally it is illegal to drive recruitment or suggest joining Australia’s proscribed terror organisations including Hamas.

Declaring support for Hamas is over. Praising October 7 2023 is officially un-Australian.

It mirrors legislation in Europe. As the bill made clear, Australia intended to: “Introduce new offences relating to extremist or terrorist behaviour” and “expand the scope of the offence of advocating terrorism to include instructing on or praising a terrorist act”.

It now has. And it is now up to the Australian Federal Police and supporting state jurisdictions, along with Homeland Security, to remove religious and ethnic fear once again from the public view.

What is certain is that schools and tertiary educational facilities will be changing their ways. These measures exist to root out hate and vilification from the classroom and campus too. Principals, administrators, teachers—and for that matter all employers in their workplaces—are on notice.

It equally puts in place the rhetoric and marketing of political aspirants.

In announcing the commencement of these new laws, Australia’s attorney general Mark Dreyfus said:

“There is no place in Australia for acts and symbols that glorify the horrors of the Holocaust and terrorist acts”.

It is as simple as that.

Nonetheless, no law is useful without enforcement.

Picture credit: The offical flag of Afghanistan’s Taliban. It shows the Shahadah or the statement of Islamic faith. As the Taliban is no longer a proscribed terror organisation in Australia, this flag and its symbology are now technically legal. Yet, the Shahadah is also frequently used as the flag of “jihad”—the Islamist war against non-believers. Its public display outside the Taliban government context then or with any suggestion of a jihadist cause such as Hamas in Gaza—is now illegal in Australia. Courtesy Voice of America, attributed AFP September 2021. Public domain.

Categories: Business, World Affairs

Tagged: Australia, Counter Terrorism, Extremism, Hamas, Hate Law, Islamism, Nazi

Antisemitic Psychosis in Australian Journalism

Adam Parker

Posted on January 4, 2024

I am reading journalists on X (formerly known as Twitter) today, who are blindly pushing the terror agenda of Hamas against Israel while also denouncing their recently deceased Australian colleague John Pilger for his past support of Syria’s Bashar Assad, infamous for his use of fuel bombs and nerve gas on his own people. They can’t see the hypocrisy.

They are rightly criticising some media for not publishing the name of Australian alleged domestic violence victim Melissa Hoskins who was killed a day after Pilger, yet will not mention a single name of a Hamas rape or femicide victim in Israel from October 7 2023.

And they are calling out other journalists for taking paid junkets to Israel as if part of a bloodlust cabal while not criticising those who fly Emirates or take junkets to the UAE (backers of the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan responsible for mass murder, rape and 5,000,000 Muslim refugees today—the most refugees from a single state anywhere in the world).

Simply put it’s a psychosis. The seething hatred that these people unabashedly exude shows that something in them has snapped.

It snapped when on October 7 Hamas raped and pillaged southern Israel in the most inhumane fashion, when Palestinians then dragged the bloodied bodies of abused women through the streets of the Gaza Strip, and when Islamist apologists then took to social media claiming that rape, abuse and necrophilia were Islamic duties because infidels deserved “humiliation” before and after death in jihad.

The snap came because in these people’s minds Palestinians were always “freedom fighters” against a “colonialist” Israel. Therefore October 2023’s misogyny had to be a tool for freedom. But they knew it didn’t make sense. Their worldview was now shattered, but their hatred of Jews was already so ingrained they couldn’t step back.

They had a breakdown bleating the most stupid of all refrains: that Jews had weaponised “victimhood” because Hamas’s Palestine can be the only victim in their story.

Fact is, if the belated resignation yesterday of Harvard’s antisemitic president Claudine Gay signals anything about the appalling plagiaristic and groupthink condition that academia is in this young 21st century, these people Tweeting are evidence of the same weakness in public communication that media bosses are right to weed out and de-platform.

You see, hate isn’t a twilight zone after all. It’s a catch 22.

That’s why after 75 years there is still no Palestinian nation and why the “Thousand-Year” Third Reich lasted only 12. Hate is always built on lies and lies can never be a foundation for anything.

Picture credit: Satellite image of Misterei, West Darfur, Sudan, showing some life after the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces attacked in May 2023. The often scandal-prone group Human Rights Watch reported that, “The mass killings of civilians and total destruction of the town of Misterei demonstrates the need for a stronger international response to the widening conflict.” Google Earth via Airbus, attributed October 13 2023.

Categories: Business, World Affairs

Tagged: Antisemitism, Hamas, Hate, Israel, Journalism, Media, Palestine, Sudan, UAE, Victimhood

From the Headlines Today—Lebanon the Fuse of War in 2024

Adam Parker

Posted on December 28, 2023

Terror Update December 28 2023—Some Things to Know: Yesterday an Australian husband and his visa-approved wife were killed in an Israeli air raid targeting the Islamic terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today Hezbollah confirmed that the man and his brother were “fighters” with the group. Mosques in Sydney will hold memorial services for them: for even though Hezbollah, like Hamas, is an official terror group in Australia, that’s homeland security for you.

On Christmas Eve it’s now estimated that 150 Christians were killed in their homes by “Islamists” in Nigeria. “Islamists” is how the media, finally picking up the story today, is describing the assailants—but I’m certain it’s more correct to say that they were affiliated with the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. The Vatican estimates that in recent years 50,000 Christians have now been killed in Nigeria. Don’t think for a moment that Islamist terror only targets Jews.

In Sudan, the Emirates-backed Islamist Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are still rampaging against their fellow Sudanese Muslims. Refugees there are now estimated at 5,000,000—the most refugees anywhere in any nation globally at present.

In Gaza Israel claims that it has now cleared the northern Strip from Hamas. Massive new Hamas tunnels have been revealed to the media. Numerous Israeli female hostages have still not been released by Hamas. Egypt has refused to open its Sinai border to Gaza’s civilians for fear of Hamas infiltration. Israel remains intent on eradicating the Hamas militia in total. Behind the scenes, the world is also still trying to find a Palestinian alternative that supports peace. Whether Netanyahu wants peace is another question while he too barely holds onto his government. What is certain is that those who predicted that Gaza would parallel the subterranean horrors of Stalingrad in 1942 were right. I’ve since taken that a step further responding to claims that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians in such a hellish landscape by explaining that no: Gaza is not Hiroshima 1945, rather the ferocious Battle of Okinawa of 1945 waged this time with its cave network built under a housing estate.

Meanwhile in the Arabian Sea and in Syria, Iran is banging the drums of war whether through its proxy Houthis in Yemen or its own Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and navy across the Levant. When the Islamic regime of Iran falls, the world will have a chance at Mideast peace again.

Yesterday, Islamic Turkey ran air strikes in Northern Iraq against the Sunni Muslim Kurds who were once allies of the West against Saddam Hussein.

And a final note for today: About 2 hours ago pro-Hamas (Free Palestine) protestors cut off numerous roads to JFK airport in New York. They are not campaigning against the terror attacks in Nigeria or Sudan, nor are they supporting the Kurds. They just don’t like Jews. The sad irony is that Hamas—who they are supporting—hates the lifestyles of these protestors too but these social-fandom-craving narcissists are too lost to admit it.

2024 will begin with hope but in war and with confusion awaiting a huge swathe of Gen Z about to be betrayed.

Looming War in Lebanon Update December 28 2023—Greek Church Hit by Hezbollah

Yesterday Hezbollah fired an anti-tank rocket from Lebanon across the Israeli border into the town of Iqrit. Its target was St Mary’s church and 10 people were injured. Hezbollah posted footage of the attack online.

St Mary’s was first thought to be a Greek Orthodox Church. New information today confirms it is a Greek Melkite Catholic church. Thankfully only one church official and nine rescuers were injured, though one is in a “serious” condition.

It is highly likely that a full-blown war in Lebanon may greet 2024 and the West will be involved.

Hezbollah came to power after the 1982 Lebanon War in response to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) taking up a presence there in the late 1970s and being defeated by Israel.

Today Lebanon has no president nor an effective government. Hezbollah is basically Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon—modern armed, well-trained but on shaky ground.

Israel has evacuated 200,000 of its citizens from northern Israel because of incursions by Hezbollah from Lebanon since October 7 in support of Hamas. Though you wouldn’t read about it widely—this is the fuse that is currently burning for an all-out theatre war if Hezbollah and Iran refuse to stand down and soon.

I can’t stress this enough. If a fresh Israel-Lebanon war comes about, it will potentially engulf so many nations including Iran, the Middle East, and the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean—that with a societally-weakened United States, Australia, Canada, UK and Europe it could well cause a global disaster. When that last happened, US Marines and French Paratroopers as peacekeepers died in Beirut.

At what point do the youth of Gen Z and the disgruntled “socialist” elders of the West realise that jihad is a war aimed at them?

With that truth, 2024 will soon dawn with an answer.

Picture credit: US Marine Barracks in Beirut explode on October 23 1983 after an Islamic Jihad truck bomb breached its perimeter killing 241 personnel. A second truck bomb struck moments later hitting a French barracks killing 58. Six civilians also died. Photo courtesy USMC, public domain.

Categories: Military, World Affairs

Tagged: Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine

Why You Won’t See Marches for Sudan Despite Murder, Rape and Four Million Refugees

Adam Parker

Posted on December 19, 2023

In Sudan right now four million refugees are fleeing their homes. An “undercount” (Times Magazine says) of 10,000 are already dead. There’s mass rape and the deliberate targeting of civilians (men, women and children) by death squads going house-to-house. Hunger and a health crisis are rife. This latest episode of the Sudanese civil war between Muslim paramilitary juntas has been ongoing for months in a cataclysm spanning years. Yet, here’s the official UN response from its handles on X (formerly known as Twitter) these past 24 hours:

@UN – It announced a “Fact finding mission” to Sudan. No call for a ceasefire.

@Refugees – This is UNHCR. They’re the UNRWA—a refugee agency— for the rest of the world. Nothing.

@UNICEF – Nothing.

@UNRWA – They’re an exclusively pro-Palestinian refugee agency, you see. Nothing.

@FranceskAlbs – This is the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese who only works for Palestine and recently graced Australian media accusing Israel of genocide. Nothing.

@DrTedros – He’s Director-General of the World Health Organization. He did repost a comment from the New York Times that included mention of “the toll of violence from Gaza to Haiti to Sudan to Israel to Tigray, where tens of thousands of women may have been raped by armed groups”. But he’s still only calling for a ceasefire—in Gaza.

@antonioguterres – He’s Secretary-General of the UN. His account actually posted something that read: “8 months of conflict in Sudan have led to a desperate humanitarian & human rights crisis. Without urgent food assistance, the risk of catastrophic levels of hunger is on the horizon for millions of people.” But no call for a ceasefire there. He did note the concept of “human rights” though. He had to, considering his incessant posts against Israel over Gaza.

Only the Archbishop of Khartoum, Ezekiel Kondo, quoting the Jewish prophet Isaiah, today has called for the “two warring parties … to consider putting their guns beyond use and silence them for peace as a matter of urgency”, for Christmas.

And what of Qatar’s Al Jazeera? It’s merely reporting the failure of those Islamic warring parties in Sudan to broker peace as a “disastrous outcome”. The main issue, they say, is that the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) will not “vacate civilian homes in Khartoum”. But there’s no outcry from the UN over that war crime.

Time Magazine says that, right now, “Sudan has the world’s largest displaced population”. Where are the protests against the United Arab Emirates, alleged sponsors of the RSF? Where’s the global outcry against another Islamic terror group spreading destruction across the globe?

Ah, there’s no Student Justice “for Sudan” movement in the West’s universities; no Boycott Divestment Sanctions corporation propping up anti-Islamist education in the West’s high schools; no socialists, teachers, US Democrats or “Queers for Sudan” marching in the streets sporting Darfur clothing—rags aren’t as trendy as keffiyehs. (Hard to get a 3-second view on TikTok with that). Why?

There’s no money in it. No grift for the UN, nothing like what BDS makes from antisemitism. And the Extremist Muslim World is so feckless, there’s no money or power for it either if it can’t send “martyrs” to bring in the UN’s aid.

To be outraged, you see, you need a meme and in Sudan, like Syria, there are no Jews to blame.

On May 26 2023 Guardian ran a headline, “‘It’s very hard to talk about’: the civilian toll of fighting in Sudan”.

In September, before Israel became trendy again, UNICEF published an article: “Tens of thousands of Sudanese children on the brink of death before the year ends”. Their report said, “333,000 children will be born in Sudan between October and December. They and their mothers need skilled delivery care … Women and girls are continually terrorised during their escape. There are more and more reports of children recruited into armed groups. And Sudan is now one of the most dangerous places for aid workers”.

Zero outrage.

It’s eight months since Sudan’s last bout of fighting began—and that hasn’t been enough time for the world to unite and march against a truly civilian-targeted ethnic cleansing there? On November 10 2023 Al Jazeera ran the story, “‘Corpses on streets’: Sudan’s RSF kills 1,300 in Darfur, monitors say”.

The article reminded the world that in the Sudanese War, that ended in 2003 and has renewed again: “About 300,000 people died in combat as well as from famine and disease brought on by the conflict. Rights groups and the UN accused these government-backed militias—known to victims as the janjaweed, or ‘devils on horseback’ – of carrying out ethnic cleansing”.

But no call by the UN today for a ceasefire anywhere outside Gaza.

Black Lives only matter when there’s money to be made from someone who’s trendy to blame.

At some point the grifters in schools, businesses and local governments will remember that “Palestinian Lives” only matter just like that.

When Arabs kill Palestinians, when Muslims kill Muslims, who cares? But antisemitism is a great cash register—until its underlying hate comes for you.

Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust of World War Two but the vicissitudes of that war killed another 60 million people along with them.

Picture credit: “The Sinews of Sudan’s Latest War”. In African Arguments, October 2023. Free use Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

Categories: World Affairs

Tagged: Antisemitism, BDS, Darfur, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, SJP, Sudan, UN

Adam Parker Presents

Writing to Inform and Entertain

RIP San Francisco: Memories of Dining With Marilyn Monroe

Adam Parker

Posted on March 1, 2024

First published March 23 2014

Postscript

For Covidiot Conspiracists Antisemitism is the New Fad

Adam Parker

Posted on February 12, 2024

How the Palestinians Changed Local Intifada into Global Antisemitism and Why it Will Fail Too

Adam Parker

Posted on February 7, 2024

Islamist Extremism Puts Australia’s Anzac Day at Risk

Adam Parker

Posted on January 12, 2024

Cleaning up Hate Australia Bans Nazi and Islamic State Symbols

Adam Parker

Posted on January 9, 2024

Antisemitic Psychosis in Australian Journalism

Adam Parker

Posted on January 4, 2024

From the Headlines Today—Lebanon the Fuse of War in 2024

Adam Parker

Posted on December 28, 2023

Looming War in Lebanon Update December 28 2023—Greek Church Hit by Hezbollah

Why You Won’t See Marches for Sudan Despite Murder, Rape and Four Million Refugees

Adam Parker

Posted on December 19, 2023

Posted on April 15, 2024

Hate on the street in the mind

Posted on April 8, 2024

The Online PR Failure of Fairfax Media

First published August 10 2014.

Dateline—Saturday July 26 2014

Israel’s rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism.

Dateline – Monday August 4, 2014

The PR dangers of online customer interaction

How this all could have been avoided

Posted on March 1, 2024

First published March 23 2014

Postscript

Posted on February 12, 2024

Posted on February 7, 2024

Posted on January 12, 2024

Posted on January 9, 2024

Posted on January 4, 2024

Posted on December 28, 2023

Looming War in Lebanon Update December 28 2023—Greek Church Hit by Hezbollah

Posted on December 19, 2023